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Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in 'justice' or in affirmation of 'rights' or in defense of 'peace' do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.
Wendell Berry -
Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.
Wendell Berry
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When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.
Wendell Berry -
Poetry can be written only because it has been written.
Wendell Berry -
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
Wendell Berry -
Small creatures die because larger creatures are hungry. How superior to this human confusion of greed and creed, blood and fire.
Wendell Berry -
If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution - the 'justice' of exchanging one damage for another.
Wendell Berry -
A mind that has confronted ruin for years Is half or more a ruined mind.
Wendell Berry
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The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.
Wendell Berry -
The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
Wendell Berry -
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
Wendell Berry -
'There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.'
Wendell Berry -
What I stand foris what I stand on.
Wendell Berry -
The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert … a man with a machine and inadequate culture … is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.
Wendell Berry
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A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
Wendell Berry -
We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry -
To farm is to be placed absolutely.
Wendell Berry -
The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.
Wendell Berry -
On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of 'agribusiness,' which prospers and 'feeds the world' (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.
Wendell Berry -
Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.
Wendell Berry
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One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.
Wendell Berry -
We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
Wendell Berry -
National defense through war always involves some degree of national defeat. This paradox has been with us from the very beginning of our republic. Militarization in defense of freedom reduces the freedom of the defenders. There is a fundamental inconsistency between war and freedom.
Wendell Berry -
Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.
Wendell Berry